THE NIJINO U-BOOT BOOTLOADER IS NOT FULLY TESTED, ALTHOUGH IT HAS BEEN INSTALLED SUCCESSFULLY ON BOTH STANDARD AND HG KUROBOXES, THERE HAS BEEN AT LEAST ONE KUROBOX BRICKED. THINK LONG AND HARD BEFORE PERFORMING THIS MODIFICATION. A BRICKED KUROBOX REQUIRES JTAG ACCESS TO REPAIR AND IS NOT COVERED UNDER THE KUROBOX WARRANTY

WARNING!

FAILURE TO FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS FOR YOUR TYPE OF KUROBOX (STANDARD OR HG) AND KERNEL VERSION (2.4 OR 2.6) WILL RESULT IN A BRICKED KUROBOX A BRICKED KUROBOX REQUIRES JTAG ACCESS TO REPAIR AND IS NOT COVERED UNDER THE KUROBOX WARRANTY

Introduction

The U-Boot project for the Kurobox is something for which the community has been waiting a long time! Nijino was the first person to provide a patch to adapt U-Boot to the Kurobox architecture and specifications! U-Boot will allow you to boot any kernel directly from the hard drive without first booting the 2.4.17 kernel stored in the Kurobox's flash memory.

Known functions and limitations

Functions :

Boot a kernel image from the hard drive in uImage format

Force Emergency Mode (EM) by pressing the the red button at the rear of the Kurobox right after the POWER LED stops blinking. (Note: EM can take around 2 minutes to start, so don't worry if you can't ping your Kurobox immediately)

Limitations :

This version of U-Boot comes with no support for ethernet, so for now booting from or connecting to U-Boot over LAN is impossible. According to the author of this patch, nijino, ethernet driver implementation will not be easy, so we may never see this function in our Kuroboxes!

Building a Linux kernel in U-Boot format

To be able to build a kernel in uImage format, you will need the mkimage tool that is built when compiling U-Boot. Alternatively, you can download a precompiled version of this tool:

This will create a uImage file in arch/ppc/boot/images/uImage. Move the image into the /boot/ directory (this is the default location that U-Boot searches for a kernel image) and then compile the modules and install them.

Make sure you download the appropriate kernel and modules for the Kurobox you have, and then tar zxvf it in the root directory /.

Flash U-Boot on your Kurobox

WARNING!

There is a possibility that you could brick your NAS with these instructions. Please make sure that you read the entire page carefully. The Kurobox and Kurobox HG use a different U-Boot flash image. If the wrong image is written to the flash memory, your Kurobox will be bricked and will require a JTAG cable and software to repair.

Sylver has built both the Standard and HG version of the patched U-Boot (1.1.4) using gcc version 4.1.2 20060613 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-5). These flash images are configured to load the kernel image from /boot/uImage on hda1.